Ty Tabing was an accidental tourist to Chicago — and loved it

now, he has grand designs on bringing more people into the Loop

The man behind the rebirth of State Street fell in love with Chicago two decades ago when a cross-country road trip gone bad left him stranded in the Windy City for three weeks with nothing to do.

Tabing and two friends from his hometown of Wichita, Kan., had planned to spend the summer after graduating from Wichita State University driving across the U.S., exploring life beyond Kansas. But the trip came to an abrupt halt after the friends totaled the car during a stop in Barrington to visit relatives. The men walked away from the wreck unscathed but without transportation.

Ever the optimist, Tabing refocused the adventure on Chicago, where public transportation was plentiful. Little did he know that those three weeks would shape his future.

"We lived the life of Ferris Bueller," Tabing said. "We went to a Cubs game, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Art Institute. We toured the Loop. These were three kids from Kansas showing up in the big city. We were a little taken aback by the pace, by the energy and everything else. We loved it."

The city seeped into Tabing's psyche that summer. Not even a season as a ski bum in Vail, Colo., or a stint as a legislative assistant in Washington for his hometown congressman, Dan Glickman, could keep Tabing from putting down roots in Chicago.

Today, Tabing, 44, is known as the unofficial ambassador for Chicago's Loop.

As executive director of the Chicago Loop Alliance, Tabing spends his days and nights (he lives in a high-rise across from Macy's State Street flagship) working to revive what was once one of the city's most overlooked tourist assets: the historic commercial downtown center loosely defined by the elevated train tracks that circle around the central business district.

His influence on the Loop's makeup began 14 years ago when he was an urban planner and tax increment financing expert at City Hall. He was the city's point man on bringing Sears back to State Street. He pinned down the North Riverside Plaza office building in the city's campaign to woo Boeing Co.'s corporate headquarters from Seattle, an undertaking bolstered by the fact his father had been a truck driver at Boeing's Wichita plant. And he helped create the city's financial assistance plan for converting the historic Fisher Building on South Dearborn Street from offices to luxury apartments.

"I feel like Ty is the kind of person who could be a multimillionaire, but he's got a civic heart," said Meredith O'Connor, managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle, a Chicago-based commercial real estate services firm and a former colleague of Tabing's at City Hall. "You would never now that Ty wasn't born and raised here."

During his seven-year run with the city, Tabing reviewed real estate developers' proposals, crunched numbers and found new uses for old buildings. He slogged through various iterations of plans for Block 37, now built but only partially occupied. As the assistant commissioner at the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, he was the government's liaison with the Greater State Street Council, the membership organization at the time for businesses in the Loop.

The sleepy organization kept the sidewalks clean and the medians landscaped, but it paled in comparison to the bigger and glitzier Greater North Michigan Avenue Association across the river. When the council's executive director post opened in 2004, Tabing left the city position to take the job.

One of his first moves was to expand. Within his first year, he folded the Central Michigan Avenue Association, a similar membership group for merchants on the east side of the Loop, into the Greater State Street Council to create the Chicago Loop Alliance.

"When I started, friends were saying the organization is dying," Tabing said. "I said the area has a lot of potential to become a bigger, stronger organization."

State Street, the city's first major shopping district, had lost is cachet to North Michigan Avenue in the 1970s. The street fell another notch when the city closed the thoroughfare to automobile traffic from 1979 to 1996 in an ill-conceived attempt to create a pedestrian-friendly outdoor shopping mall. Block 37, a prime piece of land, stymied a string of developers eager to build on the empty parcel. By the turn of the millennium, State Street was on the mend during the workday as office workers ate lunch and shopped, but it was a ghost town at night.

In recent years, the Loop has come alive at night and on weekends, spurred in large part by events

Tabing has created. Among them: the dusk-until-dawn party called Looptopia in 2007 and 2008, and Art Loop Open, a major visual arts competition in collaboration with the Chicago Artists Coalition.